A decade-long legal battle over a lost Bitcoin fortune has ended in disappointment for James Howells, an IT engineer from Newport, Wales.
Howells v Newport City Council was dismissed by Cardiff High Court. According to He told the BBC that he was denied access to a landfill containing a discarded hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins.
hard disk, Accidentally thrown In 2013, it is now worth between $700-750 million at the time of writing, with Bitcoin (Bitcoin) recently reached over $94,000 per unit.
Howells requested permission to do so Excavate the site Or receive compensation of £495 million, with a share of the recovered Bitcoin given to the council and the local community.
However, Judge Keyser KC ruled there were “no reasonable grounds” for the claim, citing environmental concerns and the council’s ownership of the contents of the landfill.
The landfill is said to contain 1.4 million tons of waste, but Howells claims to have located the hard drive with a partition weighing 100,000 tons.
In his reaction to the ruling, Howells expressed his frustration, describing it as a "kick in the teeth," according to the BBC.
Howells, an early Bitcoin adopter, mined the cryptocurrency in 2009 when it was worth little. Despite repeated negotiations and the assembly of a team of experts for the recovery effort, the council maintained that drilling was impossible due to environmental regulations.
While Howells' ownership of Bitcoin has not been challenged, the court's decision closes a chapter in a saga marked by missed opportunities and legal roadblocks.
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